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itwbennett (1594911) writes Web applications may one day surpass desktop applications in function and usability — if developers have more programming languages to choose from, according to a Google engineer. 'The Web is always available, except when it is not,' said Gilad Bracha, software engineer at Google and one of the authors of Google Dart, speaking to an audience of programmers Wednesday at the QCon developer conference in New York. 'It isn't always available in a way that you can always rely on it. You may have a network that is slow or flaky or someone may want to charge you.' Therefore any Web programming language, and its associated ecosystem, must have some way of storing a program for offline use, Bracha said. The Web programming language of the future must also make it easier for the programmer to build and test applications.

There are far too many choices now. Most of them only differ in minor semantics, but it is enough that it makes porting already well-designed code a pain. It also muddles education and opens opportunities for countless security holes through exploits.

What we need is a "golden ideal" language - which may not be possible, but if we could whittle it down to three or four special purpose languages, optimized for specific uses, and a solid general-purpose language, we'd have an ecosystem worth contributing to and using.

Yeah, I agree. The first thing to do would be to reinvent the web browser. I guess HTML would still suit for displaying static content, but all the interactive stuff is like rockets duct-taped on a stone-age sleigh.

Because developing new languages and ecosystems is fun, sexy, and gets you attention. Working in old fuddy languages with rich existing support requires reading books and bowing to other people who have already figured problems out. Bad for the ego.

I'm a old fogey. And I welcome new programming languages. Because the existing ones suck so much.

When do you suggest we should have stopped? With COBOL as the major language? or C? With PHP as the major web language? With PERL is the major scripting language?

Bring forth every language anyone wishes to invent, and let the good ones rise to the top.

Software quality is a different issue. And most of it is in unrelated to language. But on the language side, new languages can help. Take Swift vs Objective-C. Many or most fatal bugs and security vulnerabilities with C languages revolve around stray pointers, exceeding bounds, and omitting breaks in case statements or braces around if blocks. These are simply not possible in the new language. And thus software quality will be improved.

Code written in asm.js is isolated from normal Javascript code and cannot access garbage-collected data (including all normal Javascript objects). I'm not sure it's even possible to access the DOM from asm.js. So, the advantages of asm.js are:

- Non-asm.js Javascript engines can run the code.

- "Human readability" (but not that much; asm.js is generally much harder to follow than normal code.)

A main reason to use asm.js is that you need high performance, but running in a non-asm.js engine kills your performance. Granted, performance isn't the only reason to use it.

But with most web browsers auto-updating themselves, there's no need to restrict ourselves to only JS in the long run. Whatever is standardized, all browsers will support. As for human readability, that's definitely an advantage (for those that want it), but [binary] bytecode VMs can be decompiled to code that closely resembles the original source code, as tools like Reflector and ILSpy have proven for the CLR.

Yep, and even if you use the correct tool for the job people rewrite it anyway. I used XSLT to turn XML into a different XML. It was 20 lines and worked great. I came back later and somebody had replaced it with 2500 lines of C#.